In some applications, it is desirable to use a precharge/discharge type decoder to control the input of a driver circuit. Although a typical bootstrap type driver circuit is ideal for driving a large load relatively efficiently, it suffers from the limitation that the input can not change while it is driving the load high. Consequently, this characteristic of the typical bootstrap type driver circuit precludes its use directly with a precharge/discharge type decoder.
In the prior art are designs which attempt to overcome the limitation of the typical bootstrap driver circuit. One previous approach was to use an enhancement transistor to trap the charge at the booting node. This design approach limits the output drive characteristics of the device, since the optimum voltage on the booting node is only (V.sub.DD -V.sub.T)*2 instead of a full V.sub.DD *2. Another approach is to use a discrete latch before the bootstrap driver, however, this solution requires considerable silicon area, and significantly increases the amount of propagation delay.